Energy costs... what is cheap?

[shillier]

Hey... I'm new here.  Been lurking for a while and I'm intrigued, curious and considered investing something in this, even to just play around a bit. My background is IT, almost 20 years, have owned several businesses over the years; hardware, software, services... you name it. I have extensive experience in IT, data centre services, managing, architecture & design of large interconnected networks with hundreds of systems. So I have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to design, implement and operate relatively large environments.  Better yet, I have an interesting circle friends and colleagues that are just as intrigued with deep & generous pockets.

Anyways.. I'm curious to know what is considered "cheap" or reasonable electricity costs to run a profitable small scale mining operation.  I'm not really sure what should be considered small, but lets say around 250k in equipment excluding startup costs.  I've run the calculators and can see the results, but I'm looking for opinions from folks with real world experiences and that may have a better understands the market (historic, current and anticipated future). 

btw.. that figure is in CDN $$ so about 150k USD 

Thanks!
S

[1714864630]

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[1714864630]

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[1714864630]

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[RichBC]

Average Electricity cost is $0.10, Good is $0.05, Great is $0.03.

But what really matters is to do the maths for the term of the investment and see if you are going to make money when you have factored in Setup costs, Running costs, Difficulty increases, Halving, Electricity price changes and some Contingency for surprises. Not forgetting of course what the Value of Bitcoin is going to do.....



Rich

[QuintLeo]

I'd call anything under about 8 cents/KWH cheap, anything under 5 VERY cheap, anything 3 or under VERY VERY cheap.

 US average is over 10 and has been for a while, but I've not checked in the last couple years so it might be more like 11-13 range for 'average' by now.

 Other countries are all over the map, and any large country and even most medium-sized ones have regional/locality variations.


 Hawaii, for example, has some of the highest rates in the world - has to import everything it runs it's generators with, and apparently it's cheaper to import oil (even at last year's pricing) than trying to import anything else (oil tankers can carry a lot more energy content per ton displacement, keeps SHIPPING costs low).

 Chelan and Douglass County PUCs in Central Washington, on the other hand, have under 3 cent/kwh rated due to multiple large hydro projects EACH on the Columbia river, and subsidise their local rates some by selling lots of their cheap excess-to-local-needs power at quite a bit higher pricing to SeaTac area and other Washington utility company(ies).
 Grant County PUC next to the other 2 is under 5 cents for similar reasons, but only has 1 or 2 major dams to work with so can't subsidise local usage as much.

[shillier]

very good... thanks guys for the input.  Our commercial negotiated usage rates in this area are around the 0.038 CDN (or 0.028 USD) plus delivery & other fees. Given that we already have the buildings, decent power rates, this may be worth considering.

Thanks again
S

[Amph]

very good... thanks guys for the input.  Our commercial negotiated usage rates in this area are around the 0.038 CDN (or 0.028 USD) plus delivery & other fees. Given that we already have the buildings, decent power rates, this may be worth considering.

Thanks again
S

mmh you need to check those "plus deliver and other fee" because some times they are very big, it could end up in the 0.05-0.10 range, which is still good, but not like your initial thinking